The decision by West Midlands Police to ban fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv demonstrates the dangers of seeing non-violent extremists as “‘credible’ partners’’, a Conservative peer has warned.
Lord Godson, who also serves as director of centre-right think-tank Policy Exchange, made his intervention during a debate in the House of Lords on the King’s Speech on Monday.
He said that while it was right that antisemitism, and discussions about how to tackle it, were “at the top of the national agenda at the moment”, it was vital that politicians don’t get bogged down solely on the question of physical protection, but also look at how “antisemitism has now also impacted on the public sector across a range of areas, including the NHS and—of particular relevance to today’s debate—the criminal justice system and policing.”
Godson then raised the case of West Midlands Police’s decision to ban fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending their side’s clash against Aston Villa in Birmingham last year.
The JC first revealed Dutch documents that appeared to show West Midlands Police exaggerate the hooliganism of the Israeli fans in Amsterdam in a bid to justify their ban.
The force’s conduct was blasted by both the Home Affairs Select Committee – to which West Midlands Police had to apologise for inadvertently giving incorrect information – and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary; chief constable Craig Guildford stepped down from his position shortly after Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, said she lost confidence in him.
Members of the Home Affairs Select Committee were visibly shocked when questioning Guildford about why they hadn’t been told about reports that Israeli fans faced potential threats from locals arming themselves, to which he responded: “This is the first time specifically that you’ve asked for that detail”.
Godson also blasted the force’s approach to “community engagement”, adding: “The handling of the matter rightly led to the involvement of the present Home Secretary and resulted in the departure of the then chief constable.”
The Tory peer went on: “The police obviously have a crucial role to play in the fight against terrorism, but when it comes to extremism more broadly, and particularly to non-violent extremism, they also have a long pedigree of getting themselves into pickles, owing to an obsession with finding what are seen as ‘credible’ partners to reach out to vulnerable sections of some Muslim communities. Too many of these partners turn out to be sectarians and antisemites.”
He also cited the support given by the Metropolitan Police to the visit of Yusuf al-Qaradawi to London in 2004: “an extremist cleric and hate preacher who openly supported suicide attacks against coalition forces in Iraq as well as against Israeli civilians. Strangely, he too was seen as a credible figure who could persuade angry young people in this country not to become jihadists on these shores.”
A more recent example cited was that the chairman of the Metropolitan Police’s London Muslim Communities Forum was forced to step down shortly after October 7 after footage emerged of him chanting “from the river, to the sea”, a chant many – including the prime minister – consider to be antisemitic.
The government’s approach to operationally independent bodies needed to be re-evaluated “in the light of the antisemitism crisis”, Godson said, adding: “we now have to ask whether policy on these vital matters, including the impartiality of the police, is too important to be left to the police, just as war has always been said to be too important to be left exclusively to the generals.”
During the debate, Lord Sherbourne, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, revealed that “many years ago” he had written to Israel’s ambassador to disagree with calls for British Jews to make Aliyah on safety grounds, but that he had now been proven wrong and said that the present reality for British Jews was unimaginable for him growing up.
“I wrote to him to say that I thought he was being alarmist and exaggerating, and was tarnishing Britain’s international reputation. Well, today, I am afraid I have been proved wrong”, he said.
The Manchester-born peer, who is Jewish, added: “Last year the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 anti-Jewish incidents. ‘Incidents’, by the way, completely understates what it was describing. These so-called incidents involved discrimination on campuses and in the world of the arts. They involved verbal assaults on the streets of our towns and cities, attacks on Jewish cemeteries and synagogues and, worse still, as we have seen recently, attacks and firebombings leading to the deaths of Jewish people as they worshipped. These things were not happening in a foreign country a long way away. We are not talking about Germany in the 1930s and Europe. This is happening in Britain, something that none of us could have imagined when we were growing up—unimaginable.
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